Career

Worked in a London-area supermarket as a shelf stocker, late 1980s, and
for the British Department of Trade and Industry as a part-time
administrative assistant; first play to be produced,
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
, opened at the Druid Theatre, Galway, Ireland, February, 1996, and also
became his first play to appear on Broadway with its April of 1998 debut
at the Walter Kerr Theatre; wrote and directed the short film
Six Shooter
, 2005, and the full-length feature film
In Bruges
, scheduled for release in 2008.

Awards:
Most promising playwright prize, London Evening Standard Theatre Awards,
1996; Drama Desk Award for outstanding new play, for
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
, 1998; Laurence Olivier Award for best new play, Society of London
Theatre, for
The Pillowman
, 2004; Academy Award for best short film (live action category), Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, for
Six Shooter
, 2006; Obie Award,
Village Voice
, for
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
, 2006.

Sidelights

Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh has no formal training, but a sheaf
of plays he wrote during one long stretch back in 1994 turned him into one
of the most celebrated new English-language dramatists of his generation.
Nearly all of McDonagh's plays are set in Ireland, and draw heavily
from Irish idiom and culture in their skewering of once-sacrosanct
literary and political ideals. "McDonagh's writing is a
tightrope act of unnerving skill and maturity," asserted John Peter
of London's
Sunday Times
in reviewing one of the plays, which he claimed was "in the finest
tradition of Irish writing: Its hard moral drive is oiled, but never
softened, by brutal but generous humour."

McDonagh was born in 1970 in London, England, to Irish parents who had
moved there to find work. The family included his older brother, John, and
the pair of siblings grew up both close-knit and argumentative, and with
later career paths that mirrored one another's. Their father was a
construction worker, while their mother cleaned offices and houses, and
the family lived in a South London neighborhood that served as home for
many other working-class Irish émigré families.

The McDonaghs sent their sons to Roman Catholic schools, and took them
back to Ireland every summer to visit family. Their father hailed from
Connemara, on Ireland's west coast, and the rocky, windswept
district would later serve as the setting for most of McDonagh's
plays. In his teens, he was drawn to the films of Al Pacino he found on
television. In 1984, the year he turned 14, he saved enough money from odd
jobs to buy a ticket to see his first play in a professional setting: a
David Mamet drama,
American Buffalo
, in which Pacino was the featured lead.

McDonagh's brother left school around the age of 16, announcing his
intention to become a writer; McDonagh followed suit when he reached the
same age, and both wound up living on public assistance and, a few years
later, taking over their parents' house after the elder McDonaghs
had moved back to Ireland. "I didn't know what I wanted to
do," McDonagh explained to Fintan O'Toole for a profile that
appeared in the
New Yorker
about this time in his life. "I didn't want to educate
myself toward some kind of job. I didn't even want a job. I
didn't want a boss."

Over the better part of the decade that followed, McDonagh watched
television, read—the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis
Borges became particular favorites—and held various jobs, including
a stint in a supermarket and another as an part-time administrative
assistant at the British Department of Trade and Industry. Since his teens
he had also been writing down the grotesque stories he invented, which
were usually based on folk tales, and eventually amassed about 150 of
them. One was inspired by the medieval German tale about the Pied Piper of
Hamelin, the rat catcher hired by the town to rid it of vermin; when the
local authorities refused to pay him, the mysterious Piper led all the
children out of town to their deaths. In McDonagh's version, the
story is told through the voice of one little boy, who meets a menacing
man on the road one day and shares his food with him. The man tells the
boy that he will give him a present as thanks, and with that takes a
cleaver and slices off the boy's toes on one foot. Later, the
stranger leads the town's children to their death, and the little
boy with the injured foot is unable to run fast enough to keep up with the
other children, and is the only youngster who survives.

McDonagh began sending his stories to film companies in the hopes that
someone would be interested into turning them into short films, and a
couple of them were adapted as radio plays in Australia. In 1994,
McDonagh's brother went to California to study screenwriting, and
McDonagh began a nine-month stretch of writing that yielded his first
seven plays. The first play he finished,
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
, he simply transcribed "like it was a conversation I heard in my
head," he told
Newsweek
's Jack Kroll about the echoes of speech of his Connemara relatives
he seemed to hear as he was writing it. He began submitting the finished
plays to theater companies, and received consistent rejection letters
until the Druid Theatre in Galway, Ireland, contacted him and offered to
stage
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
.

The play premiered at the Druid in February of 1996 to critical acclaim
for its mix of taut drama and black humor. Its title character was
40-year-old Maureen. Never married, she lives at home with her mother,
with whom she is locked in a relationship of mutual hatred and resentment.
The plot centers around Maureen's desire to leave Ireland for
America with her suitor, a man her age named Pato. Her mother, Mag,
manages to thwart the plan, and Maureen retaliates with horrific
consequences. The play went on to a successful run on Broadway two years
later and was even nominated for a Tony Award. During that 1998 run, Ben
Brantley, theater critic for the
New York Times
, hailed both the play and its author, asserting that what
"McDonagh has provided is something exotic in today's world
of self-conscious, style-obsessed theater: a proper, perfectly plotted
drama that sets out, above all, to tell a story as convincingly and
disarmingly as possible."

After years of living in anonymity and collecting unemployment benefits,
McDonagh suddenly found himself a celebrated new literary figure in the
British Isles. In the fall of 1996, he won the Most Promising Playwright
prize of the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards, but a case of nerves
caused him to drink too much before the ceremony and, with his equally
soused brother in tow, wound up trading insults with actor Sean Connery,
who had told him to quiet down. The incident was summed up by one tabloid
headline the following day as "Irish Writer Curses Bond."

The two other plays in McDonagh's Leenane trilogy,
A Skull in Connemara
and
The Lonesome West
, were both staged in Galway in 1997. The first of the two centers around
a church graveyard that has reached full capacity, and the priest who
hires two locals to secretly dig up some remains; one of the men takes a
pair of skulls home as a souvenir.
The Lonesome West
features two warring brothers, Coleman and Valene; the former murders
their father, then takes his brother's beloved collection of
plastic saint figurines and melts them down in the oven. It also earned a
Tony Award nomination in the Best Play of 1998 category.

The three plays in McDonagh's Leenane trilogy belonged to the first
batch of work written during that nine-month period back in 1994, as did
his next three plays, collectively known as the Aran Islands trilogy. The
three Aran isles—Inishmore, Inishmaan, and Inisheer—are
situated in Galway Bay, not far from the Connemara area where McDonagh
spent summers with his family. The Gaelic language is still spoken there,
and the islands' rocky beauty, forts dating back to the Iron Age,
and toughened, fishing-dependent inhabitants has fascinated several
generations of writers, including John Millington Synge and W. B. Yeats.
The primitive way of life was also the subject of a famous 1934
documentary film,
Man of Aran
, by Robert J. Flaherty, whose 1922 work
Nanook of the North
was the first commercially successful feature length documentary movie.

Flaherty staged some elements of
Man of Aran
, and the making of the film serves as the centerpiece for
The Cripple of Inishmaan
, the first play in McDonagh's Aran Islands trilogy. First produced
in London in 1997 at the National Theatre, the play centers around Billy,
a disabled teen who seeks a part in the Flaherty film to impress the local
girl, Helen, on whom he has a crush. But McDonagh's play was also a
commentary on Ireland and what it means to be Irish.
"McDonagh's main point is that cinema has done more than
anything to foster the Irish myth," wrote Michael Billington in his
Guardian
review of the production. "The richest, funniest scene is that in
which Flaherty's film is shown on Inishmaan: the islanders either
ignore it totally in pursuit of their local feuds or hilariously question
its authenticity."

In the summer of 1997, McDonagh's earlier Leenane trilogy was
staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and that production as well
as
The Cripple of Inishmaan
gave him a rather impressive distinction: He became the first playwright
since William Shakespeare to have four plays running simultaneously on the
professional London stage. In the spring of 1998,
The Cripple of Inishmaan
moved to New York for its Broadway debut, which came at the same time as
The Beauty Queen of Leenane
was also playing, which was another extremely rare occurrence for a
modern playwright.

The second play of McDonagh's Aran Island trilogy was
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
, but it took several years to reach the stage. Theater companies across
Britain were reluctant to produce it because of its political themes; its
main character, Padraic, is a thug so violently patriotic that even the
Irish Republican Army (IRA) has rejected him. Instead Padraic leads an
extremist group, and his torture of a drug dealer sets off a chain of
events that brings the play to a spectacularly bloody end. The comic
element comes in Padraic's devotion to his cat, called Wee Thomas;
when Padraic's father, Donny, calls to tell him something bad has
happened to Wee Thomas, Padraic returns home to extract his revenge.

McDonagh actually announced that he would not write any more plays until
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
was produced onstage in Britain. The 1998 Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement
concerning Northern Ireland resulted in an IRA ceasefire and their
involvement in the subsequent peace process, and the cooling of domestic
political tensions prompted the Royal Shakespeare Company to include
McDonagh's play in its spring 2001 line-up at Stratford-upon-Avon.
In early 2006, it had its U.S. premiere at the Atlantic Theatre Company in
New York City, moving on to Broadway's Lyceum Theater in May, where
it also became a Tony Award nominee for Best Play.

McDonagh did stop writing for several years, but a few detractors
theorized that the rush of plays he had written back in 1994, and which
sustained his career over the next decade, had actually exhausted his
literary talent. He did begin writing for the stage again after
The Lieutenant of Inishmore
was produced, however, reworking one of the unproduced 1994 plays into
The Pillowman
, which won the 2004 Laurence Olivier Award from the Society of London
Theatre—considered the most prestigious awards in British
theater—for Best New Play of the season. A departure from his
previous, Irish-set stories, this one is set in an unnamed, authoritarian
state and centers around a man questioned by the police for the
horrifically violent fairy tales he tells to entertain his brain-damaged
brother, which seem to be occurring in reality. Its Broadway staging in
the spring of 2005 featured Jeff Goldblum as the police inspector, and was
nominated for yet another Tony Award.

There is one final play of McDonagh's from 1994,
The Banshees of Inisheer
, which has never been produced. He has said he will not write any more
works for the stage, and instead has ventured into film. He authored the
screenplay and served as director for
Six Shooter
, a short film that earned him an Academy Award For Best Live-Action Short
Film of 2005. His first full-length movie,
In Bruges
, was slated for a 2008 premiere with Colin Farrell as one of two hit men
who must hide out in Belgium after accidentally killing a child. "I
think I've said enough as a young dramatist," he explained
to O'Toole in the
New Yorker
profile about why he was moving away from stage drama. "Until
I've lived a little
more, and experienced a lot more things, and I have more to say that I
haven't said already, it will just feel like repeating the old
tricks."